Hit the desert with a new friend to try and find my first B/W king. We found a few of these....One of these....And finally one of these....Unfortunately it wasn't black and white.We found quite a few DORs. One of which was black and white....It's the first black and white shovel nose I've seen. Are they common? We ended up seeing 2 of them. A stick....

Ok just saw this post after PMing you lol great stuff! I dont know if those are ground snakes. They dont look quite like what i have found although very similar. That really white shovel is crazy! I agree it looks anary!!! The scond one looks odd as well. The firt one is very typical colored. That king is still awesome and looks pretty black and white compared to what you usually find though.

Glad you could get out and explore the desert though too bad about all the DORs. Thats the one thing I dont like about where u were. Lots of traffic =/

Lou here is a pic of a variable groundsnake from Calherps how they would look out this way. They arent really know to occur much west of indio... I tought at fist the way you described the blk/white shovel it could possibly be one of these guys but it looks like yours are all shovelnose.

The one I found near joshua tree looked exactly like this and so did the DOR i found out East of indio.

Thanks Jim, I didn't know there was a "clarus" phase shovel. Unfortunately, with both of them being DOR, we didn't take any venter or closeup shots.

Well... that's what I call them. like Longnose, too many show up to be considered truly aberrant (IMO) but hey... perhaps 'clarus' could be considered another word for anery...I will say that usually even the clarus phase rhino's typically have traces of red, while the shovels are usually straight up Blk/Wht.You're sure lucky when it comes to kings... jim

PS... as for how common Blk/Wht shovels are... I think they mostly come from where the yellow/brns are found... don't think I've ever seen one from the hiD or way down south, where shovels are typically tri-colored.

Last edited by hellihooks on May 18th, 2012, 9:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

Now that I'm looking at it on the computer, it doesn't look as bluish as it was on my phone. It looks like those black and white ones from SD Co. Since these come in black and white anyway, and you guys found 2, I'd say its just another phenotype from that area. Cool finds, though. I've never found a black and white one. Nice king, too.